Category Archives: vCenter

I came across something interesting today. The 160 GB C: drive on my vCenter Server ran out of space today…rather embarrassing. The first thing I checked is why in the heck my alerts didn’t go off…ok..problem fixed. After a couple of Google searches I came across and interesting VMware KB. Apparently there is a bug in the vCenter 5.5 upgrade that enables debug logging on the VMware Syslog Collector service and logs to C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Syslog Collector\logs\debug.log. In this case, my debug log was 62GB. The fix is rather simple. Stop the ‘VMware Syslog Collector’ service and edit the C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Syslog Collector\vmconfig-syslog.xml file (make a copy of it first) and change the following:

All solutions and endpoint certificates are created (and trusted) from this self-signed CA certificate

Issuer CA

Can replace the default self-signed CA certificate created during installation

Requires a CSR issued from VMCA to be used in an Enterprise/Commercial CA to generate a new Issuing Certificate

Requires replacement of all issued default certificates after implementation

Certificate Replacement Options for vCenter Server

VMCA Default

Default installed certificates

Self-signed VMCA CA certificate as Root

Possible to regenerate these on demand easily

VMCA Enterprise

Replace VMCA CA certificates with a new CA certificate from the Enterprise PKI

On removal of the old VMCA CA certificate, all old certificates must be regenerated

Custom

Disable VMCA as CA

Provision custom leaf certificates for each solution, user and endpoint

More complicated, for highly security conscious customers

Cross vSwitch vMotion

Transparent operation to the guest OS

Works across different types of virtual switches

vSS to vSS

vSS to vDS

vDS to vDS

Requires L2 network connectivity

Does not change the IP of the VM

Transfers vDS port metadata

Cross vCenter vMotion

Simultaneously changes

Compute

Storage

Network

vCenter

vMotion without shared storage

Increased scale

Pool resources across vCenter servers

Targeted topologies

Local

Metro

Cross-continental

Requirements

vCenter 6.0 and greater

SSO Domain

Same SSO domain to use the UI

Different SSO domain possible if using API

250 Mbps network bandwidth per vMotion operation

L2 network connectivity on VM portgroups

IP addresses are not updated

Features

VM UUID maintained across vCenter server instances

Not the same as MoRef or BIOS UUID

Data Preservation

Events, Alarms, Tasks History

HA/DRS Settings

Affinity/Anti-Affinity Rules

Automation level

Start-up priority

Host isolation response

VM Resource Settings

Shares

Reservations

Limits

MAC Address of virtual NIC

MAC Addresses preserved across vCenters

Always unique within a vCenter

Not reused when VM leaves vCenter

Long Distance vMotion

Cross-continental distances – up to 100ms RTTs

Maintain standard vMotion guarantees

Does not require VVOLs

Use Cases:

Permanent migrations

Disaster avoidance

Multi-site load balancing

Follow the sun

Increased vMotion Network Flexibility

vMotion network will cross L3 boundaries

vMotion can now use it’s own TCP/IP stack

Content Library Overview

Simple content management

VM templates

vApps

ISO images

Scripts

Store and manage content

One central location to manage all content

Beyond templates within vCenter

Support for other file types

Share content

Store once, share many times

Publish/Subscribe

vCenter -> vCenter

vCloud Director -> vCenter

Consume content

Deploy templates to a host or a cluster

Client Overview and Web client Changes

Client Comparison

vSphere Client

It’s still here

Direct Access to hosts

VUM remediation

New features in vSphere 5.1 and newer are only available in the web client

Added support for virtual hardware versions 10 and 11 *read only*

vSphere Web Client

Performance

Improved login time

Faster right click menu load

Faster performance charts

Usability

Recent Tasks moved to bottom

Flattened right click menus

Deep lateral linking

Major Performance Improvements

UI

Screen by screen code optimization

Login now 13x faster

Right click menu now 4x faster

Most tasks end to end are 50+% faster

Performance charts

Charts are available and usable in less then half the time

VMRC integration

Advanced virtual machine operations

Usability Improvements

Can get anywhere in one click

Right click menu has been flattened

Recent tasks are back at the bottom

Dockable UI

vCenterCluster Support

vCenter server is now supported to be ran in a Microsoft Cluster.

That’s all of the changes we were presented with from VMware. What a ton of changes, I will dig into these more soon.

Update: a post vSphere 6 – Clarifying the misinformation has been posted to clairify any changes that have or will happen between beta and this post. I did my best to validate that my information is correct.

After upgrading to vCenter Server 5.0 Update 1, you experience these symptoms:

* vCenter Server tries to upgrade the vpxa agent and all hosts are marked as disconnected * In vCenter Server, you see the Upgrade vCenter Agents on cluster hosts task in progress, but the task never completes * This issue may occur if the upgrade of vpxa agents was set to manual in a previous upgrade of vCenter Server * In the vpxd.log file, you see entries similar to:

Use the resulting PID to kill the process. Caution: Use the kill -9 command with care. It kills the process of the supplied PID without exception or confirmation. # kill -9 <PID> In this example you run kill -9 1191.